


ouroboros

by earnshaws



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-12 20:27:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15348078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earnshaws/pseuds/earnshaws
Summary: “Do you see?” Barrett had asked her, his eyes so deep and dark they looked liquid, even now never giving her the easy answer. Sasha had seen, and nodded, and then he’d sat with her for an hour while she disassembled and reassembled the toy, over and over, fascinated by the tiny complexities of its innards. That was the first time she’d ever done something like that; even now, she thinks of it every time she defuses a bomb, or picks a lock, or lifts something from a pocket with her quick deft hands. This, as so much else, belongs to Barrett.





	ouroboros

In Sasha’s dream, London is burning.

It is a slow thing, this fire, slower than it should be. Sasha has seen the way that flame takes to cities, a quick thing with hungry hands, and this is not that. It oozes across the rooftops, down the streets like rot, like sluggish sickly sunlight; everything it touches turns to pallor, taking on the horribly familiar cast of the underground. Sasha stands in the middle of the empty Upper London street, and watches the strange fire creep closer like a twining vine, and knows with the awful certainty of nightmare that she cannot run; or she can, but there wouldn’t be much of a point. The flame will find her, like it always does— slow as it is, it has the fact of unceasing on its side, and even her quick feet and hungry hands are no match for that. She will have to stop, to rest, sooner or later, and then—  


No. Better not to struggle. Better to stand, chin high, plant her feet for once in her life and in her stillness keep her— colleagues— safe. He will not have this, this one, small thing, even if he has all the rest of her. There will be something, at least for a moment, beyond his grasp.

The rocking of the airship wakes her, as the tongues of fire twine around the toes of her boots. She’s always been a light sleeper, always good at slipping out of dreams with neither shock nor sound, but this time her eyes snap open and she starts, sure she can still feel the rotten warmth on her skin. Beneath her, Hamid turns over and sighs in his sleep. (Though there’s no danger of him waking up, his soft life has left him without her sense of constant vigilance. She wishes she could be envious of that.)

Sasha breathes, counting the seconds in and out, trying to take some small comfort in the constant function of her lungs, the beat of her heart in her ears. As the feeling of sickly heat fades, she becomes aware of wetness on her back, a sharp ache that twinges as the hammock sways, and the familiar pull of the autopsy scar on her chest. Damn.

She swings out of the hammock and jumps, socked feet landing lightly on the floor, and strips off her shirt, examining it in the dim light of the lamp by the door. Not the worst it’s ever been, but not pretty, either. She balls up the shirt and tosses it onto her hammock, fishes in her bag for bandages, wraps them haphazardly round the worst of the reopened wounds, puts on a clean-ish shirt, and leaves to the sound of Hamid’s peaceable (if outsized) snoring.

Outside, on the deck, it’s a new moon; the sky is black and clear, speckled with hundreds and hundreds of bright white stars. They’re over a rural area, so there are no lights to obstruct the view, and the Milky Way shines like an icy river against the pitch darkness. Sasha throws a leg over the edge of the wooden railing and sits, arms wrapped around her knee, one foot dangling over the infinite. Looks up. 

There’s a certain clarity, about being so high up, nonchalantly perched on the edge of a yawning void. One misplaced hand or foot, one moment of off-balance and she would be gone, tumbling through empty space for whole tens of seconds before the ground rushed up to meet her. She knows from experience that such a state would make anyone else dizzy, panicked with the thought of oblivion so close, but she has...never understood why, not really. Ever since she was a child she’s loved this, lived for it, sustained herself with the sensation of toeing the hair-thin line between life and sudden, unpleasant death. It clears her head. If she were inclined to psychoanalysis she might say that it’s because it gives her a feeling of control she’s hard-pressed to find elsewhere— yes, a fall might be perilously possible, but at the same time it isn’t, because it is in her power to keep herself safe. Up here, with nothing between her and the lovely indifferent stars, there is no one to push her over or pull her back. The responsibility, the choice, is all hers.

It’s quiet. The ship is on autopilot; Earhart and her crew are nowhere to be seen. The only noise is the soft whooshing of wind as the prow of the ship parts the air; Sasha thinks momentarily of the coast, at Dover, how good the salt spray had felt on her grimy skin, her dirty hair, her chapped lips. On her tongue, clean and uncompromisingly bitter. She thinks of Zolf, and the expression on his face at the sight of the sea. She’d never been to the coast before, never even left London, and she’d expected the ocean to— to be not quite so familiar, she supposed. Its clean winds and endless expanse, the harsh comfort of the infinite, reminded her of nothing so much as all the high places of the world, void above and void below; she remembers thinking that she and Zolf, they weren’t really that different, were they? She had no god, but if she did it would be a god of that emptiness. Maybe Poseidon fits that bill. She’s not yet gotten a chance to ask.

The wind lifts and twines her hair, pushes her backwards with the movement of the prow, and Sasha sways with it, feeling for a moment that she is part of the ship— a sensation Zolf had mentioned to her, once upon a time. Maybe she was better-meant for this life, she thinks absently. Taking sail through sea and sky, surrounded by the infinite she’s chased for as long as she’s been alive. Raised in the underground, fed on sickly fire, she craves this now: this sense of space, this radical individuality. Most would find terror in the notion of an indifferent universe, but not her. There is— is a kind of freedom in it, in the realization that you are very small and the world is very large, and though you may not be able to do much good, neither can you (or anyone else, for that matter) do much harm. In the great grand scheme you are just a speck in the void, thread in the tapestry: immaterial, insignificant.

Sasha has had quite enough of significance.

For his part, Barrett always liked the metaphor of a cog in the machine. It was practically his signature, a rhetorical flourish that marked him out even in disguise. One of the few potential weaknesses he allowed himself. (He always did have a flair for the dramatic; his elder sister, Sasha’s mother gods-rest-her-soul, had maintained that it would be the early death of him. Well.) Sasha remembers with knife-sharp clarity the first time he’d ever told it to her, an early version of the polished speech he would employ as one of the many tools in his own master-thief’s kit. She’d been all of seven, barely old enough to understand (though not usually obey) instructions so simple as “Stay off the roof” and “Look at your uncle when he’s talking to you,” much less the complicated implications of Barrett’s smooth voice. His easy charisma was already beginning to show through, though it had only been three months ago that he’d become head of the Rackett family. Sasha’s age now, then, but he’d seemed so much older, so much more worthy of wonder, when he knelt down to her level, pushed her unevenly-cut hair out of her face, and patiently explained to her how she was a piece of something so much larger. “Though this may make you feel small,” he’d said, “and though in some ways you are, you are so wonderfully important to our work. You and your mother, and your father, and even me, we are all cogs in a great machine.” 

He’d pulled out a little toy, then, a child-sized trinket made of cheap brass, over-greased gears that turned the wheels when you wound it up with the string in the back. She’d tried it on the floor of their living room, and it had left tracks of motor oil where it rolled— and then Barrett had taken it and taken it apart, with the quick deft hands that were as much a Rackett family trait as their black hair and small stature, removed a thimble-sized cog and handed it back to Sasha. When she wound it up and tried to make it go, it wouldn’t.

“Do you see?” Barrett had asked her, his eyes so deep and dark they looked liquid, even now never giving her the easy answer. Sasha had seen, and nodded, and then he’d sat with her for an hour while she disassembled and reassembled the toy, over and over, fascinated by the tiny complexities of its innards. That was the first time she’d ever done something like that; even now, she thinks of it every time she defuses a bomb, or picks a lock, or lifts something from a pocket with her quick deft hands. This, as so much else, belongs to Barrett.

There was a song he used to sing to her, when she’d stayed with him those years after her mother died and her father fled back to the surface. (She couldn’t blame him, really; now that his tie to this strange clan was gone, who knew what they’d do if he’d stayed? Much less if he’d gone and taken with him his little daughter, little Sasha Rackett who looked so much like her uncle with the pleasant voice and the knife-quick fingers?) She’d been maybe eight or nine, counted by the perpetual inconstancies of Other London, and when she had nightmares Barrett would sit up and sing to her. She can’t recall the words, but the tune is still there, and as much as— as much as she wishes, these days, to be rid of Barrett and all he has given her, she has good memories associated with it. Comfort is hard to come by these days and he was good to her, Barrett was. Even on the nights when he came home with blood on his threadbare shirt, crusted under the fingernails he’d use to brush Sasha’s overgrown bangs out of her face, he was good to her.

Sasha’s never had a great voice, too gravelly and raspy with underuse— one part of her that was nothing like Barrett, who could make a meritocrat kneel with naught but a few well-placed words, whose tones were as sweet as her mother’s when he sang to her. But she can carry a tune well enough, and she’s humming to herself more than anything. 

The soft rushing of the wind mostly carries the song away from her, up and out into the endless night sky. It swallows it up in its vastness, and Barrett is nowhere to be seen, and Sasha is alone.

“Hello?”

Sasha jumps a little and turns to the sound of the voice, reflexively gripping the railing with her gauntleted hands in case its owner means her harm. “Who’s there?” she calls, a little defensively. The last notes of Barrett’s song linger in the back of her throat, unsung and sour.

“Earhart,” says the voice, and as Sasha’s eyes resolve to a sight that isn’t the expanse of stars before the ship she can pick out the captain’s stout figure, at the entrance to below-decks. Or whatever the proper aero-nautical term is for the underneath bits of a ship. She’s wearing flannel pajama pants, slippers, and a bathrobe, and glasses. Sasha has to bite back a smile. “What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”

Sasha shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep,” she calls back. “You?”

Earhart crosses the deck with her usual purposeful stride, and sits down on the railing next to Sasha. “Checking on the ship, and thought I heard someone.”

“Isn’t the ship on autopilot?”

Earhart looks a bit sheepish. “It is, but I get nervous. Like to make sure she’s doing all right, you know. Really just force of habit.”

Sasha nods.

They’re silent, for a good few minutes, both of them looking up at the stars. It’s...oddly companionable. Earhart— Sasha is surprised, though she probably shouldn’t be, at her nonchalance about the void beneath them. Gratified, a little bit; if Hamid or Zolf or (gods forbid) Bertie had come out here to keep her company, not a one of them would have dared to set foot over the railing, and then it would have just been awkward. Earhart is an airship captain, though, so it makes sense that she’d have a familiarity with height and space that reminds Sasha pleasantly of her own.

“You must have good hearing,” Sasha says, after a while.

Earhart turns, frowns at her in confusion. “What?”

“Er. You must have good hearing. To have heard me all the way up here, I mean.” Sasha hopes Earhart can’t see the blood rushing to her face— normally her unfamiliarity with words doesn’t bother her, but this is a woman she can respect, in the particular way reserved only for people like her (another remnant of Barrett, and the strange morals of the Rackett machine), and she doesn’t want to make an idiot of herself. “I’m usually quite quiet.”

“Oh.” Earhart nods, slowly, not quite sure what to make of this. “Yes, I suppose I do.”

More silence.

“You don’t—” Earhart sounds uncertain— “you didn’t happen to be...humming, did you?”

Sasha jumps, a little, and all the blood that’s left her face in the chill breeze of the night air comes right back. “A little, yeah,” she admits; normally she’d be defensive, about this kind of thing, but something about Earhart (her easy practicality, her matter-of-fact perch on the railing, how familiarly quick her hands are on the airship’s controls) disarms her. “Sorry if I bothered you, I didn’t think—”

Earhart waves a hand. “You didn’t. I only brought it up because I thought I recognized the song.”

Sasha frowns. “Really.”

“My pop used to sing me something similar, when I was a girl. I think it was a sea shanty— he worked on the docks back in England, that’s how he knew your friend’s brother. All those old dogs, they’re like family, you know how it is.”

You have no idea, Sasha thinks.

“Does it go like—” and Earhart hums a few bars of the song, her voice smoother than Sasha’s but less able to hold a tune, and the sheer strangeness of hearing it in a mouth that does not belong to a Rackett makes Sasha clench down on the railing until her knuckles are white, loose splinters digging into her fingers.

Earhart doesn’t notice. “I can never remember the lyrics, but the tune, it’s one of those that sticks in your head for years, you know? I suppose you do. Funny thing, this— where’d you hear it?”

Sasha swallows, tries to pry her hand from the railing. “I had an— an uncle, who sang it to me.”

“Seaman?”

“No. Other London.” 

If this makes Earhart think any differently of her, she doesn’t show it. “He still around?”

“Dead.”

“Condolences.”

“‘S all right,” Sasha manages, around the sudden, painful lump in her throat. “I didn’t know ‘im that well.”

“Still, though. Family’s family.”

“You could say that.”

Silence, again. Sasha manages to stop clutching the railing like her life depends on it, trust her balance enough to let go. Earhart doesn’t seem to notice that she’s breathing harder than usual. Maybe the rush of passing air, its noise soft but insistent, drowns her out.

Earhart leaves, after a while, with a brisk “goodnight” and a friendly hand on Sasha’s shoulder. (Sasha manages to conceal the wince.) And then it’s just her, alone in the dark; Sasha and the song in her head, Barrett’s song, like a whisper on the wind. Between her and the stars— something about that thought makes her recoil, physically; the notion of Barrett with her, always, even here. Even now. 

Her back aches in the cold. She can feel the blood seeping through the bandages— it seems as though it’s getting worse, her scars opening always a little further, healing a little less each day. She can never quite put her finger on proof, but she knows it; creeping, insidious, like the pleasant tone of Barrett’s voice when he’d told her cousin Lucy just what he’d do to her (non-Rackett) stepbrother if Lucy left for the surface. _We take care of our own, Lu. That includes you. Not him._

Sasha was still one of their own. Barrett had told her as much, when she and the others had gone to visit him, all those weeks ago— somehow that feels more distant than all her other memories of her uncle. Blurred and indistinct, while the latter are clear, and sharp as any one of her daggers. (Barrett always killed with knives, when he was obliged to get his hands dirty; one more thing of his about her, one more thing she can’t escape.) She had run, far away as she could and then even farther, and here she still was. Here he still was— in her singing, in her voice and her face, her hands and her thoughts, guiding her the way he had when he’d taught her how to use her first real weapon. Long quick fingers over her child’s hands, on the hilt of the wooden dagger; standing behind her, his hair falling over his shoulder so that it was indistinguishable from her own. Always. 

In her sickness, too. The most prominent old wounds that have opened up are the autopsy scars on her chest and the imprinted Maltese falcon on her back (and as painful as it is every time she thinks of it she has to snicker, remembering the sheer ridiculousness of the situation that caused it— some mercenary group they are, unable to even capture a frail old man without tripping over their own feet). But— there are others, older scars knit closed and invisible beneath her skin, that are returning. A thin line on her cheek from a particularly intense sparring match with Brock, a cigarette mark on the inside of her wrist from a dare— and on her collarbone, normally faded so much as to be nearly invisible, the Rackett symbol, burned into her skin with a brand. 

Families in Upper London had crests, great big ornate things you put on armor and above doors and carved into fine wood in ancient and venerable libraries; in Other London, clans identified themselves with symbols. Simple and easily recognized, and no trouble to imprint and make recognizable onto all sorts of things. Every member of the Rackett clan, and every member of their machine, had one. Since time immemorial it had taken the form of an ouroboros, a snake biting its own tail, fangs sunk into flesh. Chasing itself in circles. No one was quite sure what it meant, except for Barrett— that was the thing, only the head of the family was ever supposed to know.

Sasha looks down at it, now, in the dim light of the hundreds and hundreds of stars. The oozing blood looks black, but it doesn’t obscure the simple design, perfected over centuries: you might think it was just a circle, were it not for the clear presence of the snake’s fangs, its scales, and its one empty eye, dotted with blood, glinting blackly up at her.

When Barrett had branded her she had been all of thirteen, and she had not screamed. She had bitten down on the rag he had given her and stood still while he cleaned the wound with antiseptic and bandaged it with gauze, and the only time sound had escaped her was when she asked him what it meant.

He was not supposed to tell her. He should have patted her on the head and sent her away, and left the secret for if and when she rose as high as he had. But she was the Rackett clan’s favorite daughter, fast and quick-fingered and left for them by her father’s outside blood, and even then she looked so much like her uncle. 

“It means that things repeat themselves, over and over, with only their surfaces changing. It means— constancy, in a sense. For us. That you cannot run from us, whether you are ours or not, and that there will never come a time when you cannot rely on us. It means that no matter how things change, we will find a way to survive, and continue as we were.” He’d squeezed Sasha’s shoulder, and there was no small amount of pride in his voice when he’d said: “It means we are inescapable.”

Ironic, then, that he’d been the one to break the cycle of secrecy. Ironic that now there were two people living who knew what the Rackett symbol meant; if she chose she could shout it to the world, smash the tradition for good. Break her uncle’s reputation, put them all in danger. But she won’t— she wouldn’t then and she won’t now— and she has an awful suspicion that that is, in fact, why Barrett had told her.

Ironic, too, in a different way, that the scar she’d thought faded would choose now to open up; now, when she thought she’d proved Barrett wrong, proved them all wrong, escaped. For years she’d gone without noticing hide nor hair of the machine and now, now— a nasty little voice in her head wonders if she’d ever actually believed in an escape at all.

It takes a particularly strong gust of wind for Sasha to notice the cold sting of tears on her cheeks.

The sun is coming up, over the horizon— it takes a practiced eye to see it but she catches the grey lightening of the bottom of the sky, the slight fading of the stars there. She should go in, clean up, get properly bandaged; there’s no guarantee of any kind of peace today, despite the ostensible absence of enemies, with Zolf and Bertie at each other’s throats as they are. With effort she swings her leg back over the railing and, stiff from the cold, turns her back on the endless night. 

The last, unsung notes of Barrett’s song linger in her throat, warm and sour as rotten fire.


End file.
